So for the past week I’ve been here in Alaska collecting samples of moss and oh boy has it been an interesting learning experience on how fieldwork can go wrong. Because the grant my mentor in working on is a collaboration of various labs, in order to collect samples for this a lot of organization and communication was needed in order to make sure everyone’s needs were met and this was absolutely not what happened. With a three-woman group it has been almost impossible to fulfill the demands originally proposed by this trip. Everyone had different ideas and information regarding what we were doing, everyone involved with planning vastly misinterpreted how much time almost every step of this excursion was going to take leaving us with very little room for flexibility. Moral of the story is that we’ve had to cut a large chunk of what was needed from the collection and processing and we are still looking at an 18 hour day (potentially) tomorrow! So wish me luck!
In other news, Alaska is, as usual, gorgeous this time of year. There was a fairly large fire recently that left some brutal smoke over Fairbanks (where I am), but it’s more or less dispersed. The moss here covers everything. In the forest, more often than not, you can barely see the forest floor. There was a few time when we were knee deep in beds of moss as far as the eye can see. It’s nothing like you could imagine, plus it’s squishy and wet like soaked carpet. Heres a bunch of pics of some moss and stuff for you guys!
Sorry they’re on Imgur, the blog website won’t let me upload photos since the resolutions are too high and it’s too much of a pain to lower each photo to put on here.
